Printing from Max/MSP/Jitter

May 9, 2008 @ 16:32

For a project i am working on i needed to have a way to print pictures from Max. The first (and easy) step was to save the image to the disk. But for printing a file there is no default object. But thanks to the aka.shell external I was able to actually print the file on a Mac.

Just as simple as:

lpr -P printername "/path/to/file"

Easy as pie. To configure your printer use CUPS: http://127.0.0.1:631/

update
The most common mistake here is that there is a space in the path to the file. To make sure that it works put this in the messagebox that goes to the aka.shell:

lpr -P printername \"/path/to/file with/spaces\"

This will keep the full path intact instead of splitting it at the space, in which case lpr will never find the file.